Don't do it, don't fly Deathstar

So we tried our first international flight on a budget carrier.  With 4 kids.

I'll try to keep this easy-to-read.

The title says it but some details and even positives to come from this experience.

To make this easier, it was a flight from Melbourne to Hong Kong via Singapore.

The bad stuff started when I got the ubiquitous "your flight has been cancelled for operational reasons" 2 days before we leave. Closer inspection reveals that it's the SIN-HKG stretch with Jetstar Asia that got the ol' boot.

I'd seen this happen before to others. Some older couple were waiting for hours in MEL domestic getting a flight back to Launceston scheduled for 2pm. They ended up flying out at 11pm, with a lovely 3 hour drive to look forward to at midnight. Notwithstanding the fact that Melbourne Jetstar domestic sucks big time.

Anywho, this isn't a rant.

So we ring up several times and get several different stories, a theme that is the only consistent approach in the way Jetstar deal with their clientele.

Cancel all flights out, rebook the entire trip (MEL-SIN-HKG) a day later. Nope, no time to waste. Aami weren't much help either, stating we had to incur a loss to attempt a claim.

Aftet several calls, we suggested that they rebook the second leg only and whaddaya know, there was a later flight. Instead of arriving at 1pm, we'd arrive at 8pm. Okay, so we compromised.

This is another issue with Jetstar service, you need to do the thinking and suggesting for them. Don't expect them to volunteer useful information. Another theme that carries through the Jetstar experience.

Flight from MEL to SIN was nothing exciting. We got a new A330 and the seats were pretty decent though the legroom was smaller than full service. I'll pay for the extra legroom.  You have to pay lots for rubbish food and drinks.

The typical travel hack for this is pack lots of snacks for the kids and fill water bottles in the airport and on the plane. It sort of works but I find that on longer flights, being served food breaks up the flight.

Kids have tablets each. Again this helps. Stock them with movies and see if you can get them to share, so each tablet has longer battery use. It'll save you a little from the last 2 hours being "how long until we're....". It won't save you from the Charlie n Lola vs Lion King 5th time arguments.  Nothing will save you from that.

Given we spent extra time in the air over Singapore waiting for a storm to finish, extra batteries would have been fan-flippin-tastic. There were more red rings on the flight map than the haemmoroids department of the RPA.

So we arrive at Changi.  Courtesy of some astute capsule wardrobing by mummy, we only checked the pram in on the way there, despite paying for 2 extra suitcases of checked baggage.

But the problem was because the 2 legs were no longer linked together, we had to fetch our pram from baggage. Which means clearing Singapore customs.

Now the transit area of Changi is pretty good but we were outside of it with very few restaurants at 9pm with 16 hours to kill. Not fun.

So we go to the Jetstar counter and ask about what to do. Come back at 11pm. So we needed to eat, had nowhere to relax and had to kill time outside of transit.

After paying for an overpriced meal which was still pretty good we let the kids play in a playground full of other screaming kids - so much that it'd test the engineering of that floor.

11pm comes, we spend an hour in line only to be told that there's no ability to allocate seats so early on the flight, therefore no checkin. We need checkin to get back to transit and sleep. So after some polite firm insistence we get our boarding passes and go in.